Stone bar tops in Bankside

Yes. Bankside is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE1. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. A bar fit runs longer than a worktop run, because the frame, the support and the stone are three stages and only the last of them is quick. A red route buys minutes and a bar top needs hours. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These buildings have firm rules about what can be propped open, left in a lobby or carried through the residents entrance. What is called a bar in a flat like this is usually the end of a peninsula with stools pushed under it, and the projection was drawn on the layout long before anybody worked out what would carry it. Blockwork holds a fixing and plasterboard does not. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. On a bar that counts twice over, because the same obstruction has to be cleared by the stone above it and by the knees of whoever is sitting at it. The riser is boxed to a line the stone can follow.

Piece length is set by the internal diagonal of the lift car, not by the length of the slab. The steel and the corbels travel that same route and go in first, so a bar is three separate carries into one room rather than a single delivery. Steel for the overhang is carried in and fixed before the stone. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. That has to cover more than the unload, since the corbels, the flat bar and the fixings all come off the van well before the top does. Packaging and offcuts go back the way the top came in.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and worktop installation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. New-build kitchens are usually smaller than the plan suggests once the appliances are in, so the usable run is shorter than the drawn run. A bar is nearly always the last thing added to a project, so it is templated on a visit of its own once the joinery around it has stopped moving. What gets leaned on gets specified for leaning. Buyers upgrading before handover work to a choices deadline set by the sales office rather than by the build programme. Where the same detail is repeating across several rooms the support gets standardised once and then cut to length, which is cheaper than drawing it each time. Batch work still gets its own template per room.

Where an overhang is too deep for steel on its own the choice is a leg at the end or a bracket underneath, and a bracket that lands where a knee goes is worse than no bracket at all. A bar laid over that is a second level rather than a wider one, so it wants a spine underneath it and a settled detail where the two heights meet. Clear length between the returns sets the stool count. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. A bar top is levelled to itself rather than to what it stands on, so the packing goes into the frame and the stools take up whatever the floor is doing. Steel spans what a carcass cannot. Send the peninsula dimensions including how far the top is meant to project, the stool count, and the internal dimensions of the service lift. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. A home bar is discretionary work, so the edge profile, the corbel detail and the radius on the nose are worth settling properly rather than defaulting to whatever is quickest. A fixture is drawn for the long run, not the current tenant.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Plasterboard partitions mean light scribes and clean joins, and the fabrication effort moves to the visible faces instead. A bar top put into a room like that is an overhang question first, because the nose has to carry people leaning on it long after the slab has stopped being interesting. The stone follows the frame, and the frame follows the stools.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. Where the counter runs flush with the working surface instead of standing above it the whole thing becomes one plane, which looks better and doubles the unsupported span. A bar on an end takes the corner load a wall used to take.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. A trade bar is fitted around opening times, so the window the van has and the window the room has are rarely the same window. One van, one bar, one visit.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. A car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a three-metre worktop however it is stood, and there is no trimming it on the landing. A top with a bonded apron on the front arrives deeper than a worktop and behaves like a beam, so there is no easing it round a turn at all. A bonded apron makes the piece deeper than the doorway expects.